Adium X 0.72 fixes problems with Applescript filters, contact list autosizing, and auto-away after idle; it also fixes a common crash when connecting to the MSN network. As always, check out the version history for a full list of changes. 🙂

Adium 0.71 is now available. The 0.71 update corrects several issues including errors with proxy settings, minor issues with the log viewer, a crash involving Tic Tac Toe, and more. See the version history for a complete list of changes.

The Adium team has updated Adium, its free multi-service instant messaging client for Mac OS X. The 0.7 update includes a major revamp of the contact list, improved group chat support, contact grouping, Rendezvous support and numerous other additions and improvements. Adium supports all the major instant messaging services — AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, and more — and features an attractive, customizable interface.

A lot has changed in this release, so be sure to take a few moments to explore the new options and adjust. The contact list has gained a ton of new features, including the ability to display user icons, service icons, away messages, group gradients, and more. We’ve also added a new style of list called “Group Bubbles” which we’re very happy with. Because of the extent of the contact list changes, your current list layout & theme settings won’t transfer over into the new version, and old theme files will no longer work. We look forward to seeing the cool layouts and themes our users will create with the new options in 0.7 🙂

Another major new feature in 0.7 is contact grouping (also known as meta-contacts). Contact grouping allows you to group multiple contacts into a single entry on Adium’s contact list. This is extremely useful when someone on your contact list has multiple user names spread across several services. With contact grouping, simply hold down option and drag their multiple names onto eachother, and Adium will treat them as a single ‘contact’ on your list. You can see the contents of a contact group in the “Get Info” window or in the contact list tooltip. Adium will also honor any contact grouping already set up in your address book.

In addition, Adium 0.7 brings greatly improved multi-user chat support on AIM, Jabber, and Yahoo. Now we can create our own chats and join chats without an invite via “Join Group Chat…” in the file menu. A large number of multi-user chat bugs have been fixed as well.

Add to this 18 crash fixes and over 50 corrected bugs and you’ve got an Adium release that’s certainly not worth missing 🙂

Additionally, our code repository hosting and email provider, penguinmilitia.net, will be donating $5 to Adium for every year-long subscription by an Adium user. If you want, check them out and be sure to let them know you appreciate what they do for the project. 🙂

OK, seems like I really need to post something here to try to stop people asking about the event notification window from time to time in the forums. Not that I really believe this is going to stop it really, but seems the right thing to do.

The event notification engine in current Adium will be replaced by the Growl plugin. Not for the inmediate next release (0.7), but soon. My personal plan is to make this change as seamless as posible for the users, maintaining the same interface to activate and trigger it using alerts, same preferences and the like so it works right out of the box (despite the installation of Growl, which should be straightforward also when we bundle it, or something).

So, if you have request or suggestions regarding the event notification engine, please try Growl (instructions to activate the Adium Growl plugin here) and submit your ideas at the Growl Forum and/or the Growl IRC channel.

Early last month Adium moved its source code repository to the future of version control, Subversion, which has made a big difference in our development process. The fine penguin generals from the penguinmilitia are graciously donating both space and bandwidth for our hosting; the Adium team greatly appreciates their contribution to the project. They do web design and more in addition to hosting; to learn more, check out www.penguinmilitia.net.

The MSN service is having some issues at the moment, you may not be able to sign in, or if you do you probably won’t be able to message anyone. There is no known workaround at this time, so let’s wait and see if the servers fix themselves :-).